I am a perfectionist is some areas of life. I am not advocating theological perfectionism, but rather confessing to the personality construct of feeling like you always have more to do in a certain area and you are never satisfied with it. This is something many people deal with, but more on that in a moment.

Since preaching the Bible has been the focus of my entire adult life, I naturally gravitated toward a perfectionist standpoint on preaching. In my earlier days of pastoring, I would lament for a day or so if I felt I did not give my “best effort.” Above all people in my life, my wife has been most influential to me and my most faithful counselor. In the car I can remember many a Sunday early on where I was totally defeated thinking it was a bad sermon. She would say things like, Seth, did you preach the Gospel today? Or Seth, did you preach the Bible today? I would say, to the best of my abilities. Then she would say, then it was not a bad sermon. What a wife! 

I have room to grow as a preacher for sure, but I have gotten more comfortable in my own skin over the years. Over the years, experience and a better understanding of the Gospel has helped my “perfectionism” die down significantly. Praise be to God! 

In our church, we have been going through the Gospel of Mark for over a year. I have tried to work through each passage with exegetical care and gospel clarity. As I look back over the series, I know there are some sermons that were not as good as the others. I recently had one that I thought was sub-par. At the end of my delivery, I knew it could have been so much better. 

Yet, I was so encouraged in one area as I walked away from the message. In a Team meeting for a church ministry later that day, one of my friends was talking about how he never wanted to give up going to churches that practiced expository preaching. With my dud of a delivery on my mind, I thought to myself, expository preaching takes the focus off of the preacher and onto the Word. Even if a sermon is poorly presented, the people of God are still being fed. Whenever a preacher delivers the Word of God to the people of God, even if it is not his best effort, the Spirit of God can apply it a multitude of different ways to the hearers. 

I have seen this phenomenon play out many times over the years where an off-handed, unprepared sermon statement was used by God to sanctify his people. So as preachers, I think we need to be less concerned about creative content and more concerned about clear, Biblical, gospel-centered content. Churches should also feel let down if a Sunday goes by and a sermon is more oriented toward illustrations and anecdotes than the uncompromised teaching of Scripture.  

So two takeaways: First, if you are a preacher, always remember, when we preach the Word, God the Spirit is working on the other end. He is taking the power of His inspired Word and applying it to convict and illuminate His people. Pastors, we are not nearly as important as we think. I will never forget this bluntly illustrated by one man saying, “Pastor, if you think you are indispensable to the work of God, remember, if you die this week, someone else will be preaching in ‘your’ pulpit the next Sunday. The church will have your funeral, put you in the ground, throw dirt on your face, and go back to the church and eat potato salad.” That sure puts it into perspective, does it not?

Second, if you are listening to the Word preached, remember sometimes your pastor will preach poor sermons. He may be running short on time. He may have had a bad week. He may be tired. He may have wrestled to understand what the passage was saying or how to apply it. (I am guilty on all accounts). But please never forget, even when the preacher is struggling, God’s Spirit is seeking to minister and apply the Word to your heart for that week. Depend upon the Spirit to point you to Christ on the Lord’s Day even more than the preacher. Pray that God raises up capable preachers in your own context to handle the Word faithfully. Then watch God transform your life! Not because your pastor is a creative innovator. Rather, because he has pointed you to Christ through the Word of God. 

Soli Deo Gloria!